Gaza City // An Israeli air strike in Gaza killed a pregnant woman and her toddler on Sunday.
The bombing raid demolished a house in the northern area of Zeitun, killing Nur Hassan, 30, and her two-year-old daughter Rahaf, Gaza medics said, and trapping three others under the ruins.
Their deaths came after Gaza was drawn into the escalating violence on Friday, when Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians, including teenagers at the territory’s border.
Also on Sunday, a Palestinian woman set off a bomb in the West Bank, Israel said.
The sharp escalation in violence over the past week has led to mounting fears of a wider Palestinian uprising, or third intifada.
Overnight, Israel said it targeted “two Hamas weapon manufacturing facilities” after Gaza militants fired two rockets and following attempts by Palestinians to cross the border.
One of the rockets had hit an open field in southern Israel and the other was intercepted.
Border clashes that broke out on Friday came as Hamas’s chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, called the overall violence an intifada and urged further unrest.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, remains deeply divided from president Mahmud Abbas’s West Bank-based Fatah.
In Sunday morning’s bomb blast near Jerusalem, a policeman spotted a “suspicious” vehicle close to the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim and ordered the 31-year-old woman to stop, police said.
She exited the car and the explosives inside it detonated, wounding her seriously and the officer lightly.
*Agence France-Presse
